


from the top of my heart

by mildlydiscouraging



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos-centric, Live Show: Condos, Love Confessions, M/M, Missing Scene, Near Death Experiences, Normal Life, Science, Time is Weird, they're in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-17
Updated: 2017-04-17
Packaged: 2018-10-19 01:15:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,668
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10629126
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mildlydiscouraging/pseuds/mildlydiscouraging
Summary: All Carlos wanted to do was ask his boyfriend to move in with him, but no, first he had to get eaten by some giant obsidian gelatin. Because, you know. Of course.





	

Carlos remembers the cube. He remembers touching it, feeling it sluice from solid to starchy smooth liquid, wondering if it was some kind of shear thinning polymer, watching his hand sink into the cool void. He remembers dials and notes, tubes and switches in sight but too far. Then he remembers gasping for air, the expansion of fragile lungs, and nothing in between.

He reaches for something, finds nothing, and hacks out black goo. No, goo isn't scientific enough. Slime? Ooze? Gelatin? Alright, goo it is. And someone is talking—who he must be lying back against or there's an earthquake too—saying the same word over and over in an increasingly worried tone, it's Cecil, and his name, oh right, that's his name.

"Carlos," Cecil says again in a different tone as Carlos rolls out of Cecil's lap and onto his knees. He can't seem to stop coughing, black specks spotting the dusty broken concrete between his hands, and Cecil rubs gentle circles into his back.

"It's alright, you're fine, you're safe."

"Relatively speaking," Carlos manages to get out between hacks. He sits back on his heels and clears his throat. A sizable glob of black lands in the center of his palm. Concerning, but also intriguing. He pockets it before Cecil can notice.

"Well, you _were_ just absorbed by a giant cube," Cecil says, "so I think relatively speaking is pretty good."

Overhead the sun slants under a cloud and glints off one of the condos. The glare snatches Carlos's glance and he sees an unrecognizable silhouette and swallows. His own condo ( _hishisbelongstohimhebelongsto_ ) is chalky and opaque, but the more successful monoliths lining the block are glass, grey and clear, perfect displays backlit by an aching sun. The longer he watches, the more he feels put off by the lack of completion. If only he just...

Carlos straightens up and finally looks at Cecil and, even through the greasy smudges on his glasses, knows immediately something is off. Cecil's smile is too thin, his eyes too tight. They make eye contact for longer than one second and Cecil turns away, waving a hand in Carlos's general direction.

"I'm fine, don't worry about me. You're the one who could've..."

He doesn't finish the sentence. He doesn't have to.

"I'm here," Carlos says. "We're here."

He tries to smile reassuringly, and while Cecil still looks a little wild, his hands are careful as they smooth over Carlos's shoulders, his cheeks, his hair. Carlos closes his eyes at the feeling, slowly reconnecting with the solid ground underneath him, but opens them again when Cecil stops.

"Cecil?" Cecil hums, his eyes shut very tightly, his mouth pursed. Before he continues, Carlos pushes his glasses on top of his head, both to keep his hair out of his face and so he can see Cecil more clearly.

"Cecil," he says again. When Cecil looks up at him, Carlos panics for a second, every carefully planned word he'd been working on all day running away in a moment.

"I was thinking about time," is what he ends up with, and he manages to fumble his way through something about the perception of time, how endless and subjective it is. Cecil understands, or at least is distracted, and his inquisitive look overtaking the prior anxious one bolsters Carlos.

"I was also thinking about space," he continues, more firmly finding his way back to speech he'd practiced. "About how it is nothing, and then a point, which is just a single spot within the nothing, and a line which separates the nothing into two nothings, and how a plane is a patch of nothing, and an angle just where two nothings meet," and the longer he talks the faster the words flow, like a train hurtling down a splintered track, "but all those things combined, with an object of points, lines, planes, and angles. An object with length and width and depth that can take up actual _space_. Until that object becomes something made of nothing, _within_ nothing.

"An object can be a wall, a floor, a roof, a bed, a table, a dog, a door, a rug, a..."

He catches Cecil's eye accidentally and knows they both know what Carlos is trying to say.

"A home."

Neither of them look away, locked in a moment of feeling that words could only disappoint. It breaks when Carlos feels his glasses slip a little and he pulls them off to try and clean them, watching them with overzealous concentration as he says,

"And then I thought about how a home is just a group of objects connected by a shared personal experience of time—our past, our present, our assumed future. A home is..."

He pushes his glasses on with one hand waves with the other, not seeing Cecil's fond smile.

"I mean, uh, scientifically speaking, speaking from the point of view of mere facts and logic, and um..." His hand falls into his lap. "You know, what with science and all..."

There is a growling sound down the street behind them and Carlos stumbles.

"Uh, I– I– I just thought it was time for us to make a home together."

He shrugs, finally looking back to Cecil, and oh. Oh.

If Carlos hadn't already known he was in love, he would be certain now. Cecil looks like... well, like Carlos hung the moon, if the moon wasn't at best a government conspiracy and a worst an unfixed beacon hanging too low in the sky. He's never seen anything more beautiful. He doesn't immediately notice how time has stopped. It stops often.

"You okay?" Carlos asks after a little while. Cecil's face is stuck like two old photos left in the same box for too long, and it's grown from charming to concerning.

When Cecil shakes his head and blushes, it firmly slides back into charming.

"Yes, totally, one hundred percent. Yes. Yes!"

As Cecil's arms wrap around his shoulders and spill them both onto the floor, Carlos realizes those were two different answers.

"Yes?"

"Yes," Cecil says into Carlos's neck, "that would be neat!"

He immediately groans at himself, but Carlos just laughs and hugs him back. He feels warm, and _whole_ , and nothing at all like the empty completion that had sunk into his skin in the condo.

Cecil moves back just enough to let them both sit up and looks him in the eye as he says, "But somewhere else, okay? A duplex, or an apartment. I don't think a condo."

"No, not a condo," Carlos spits out the words as quickly as possible. If he doesn't have to ever think the word again, that'll be just fine. He's had enough of condos for an average lifetime, and then some.

As impossible as it is, Cecil smiles even wider. He leans forward, their noses trying to occupy the same space for the briefest of seconds, and Carlos keeps his eyes wide open. There's only ever so much time to just look.

"I love you." The words slide out, like he's been holding them in slippery fingers and forgot to hold just long enough for them to escape. He's been waiting for the perfect moment to say it, panicked internally every time it halfway stumbled out in a goodbye or quiet moment, but somewhere he stopped searching for the best time and went for the right one. No moment would ever be perfect, no, but by just saying the words, it is enough.

"I love you," Carlos leans back and says again, not a question but a curious 'of _course_ , I _love_ you, how could that have ever been in dispute?' unvoiced in so many words.

"You...?"

"I love you, Cecil," and the third time's the charm as Cecil comes careening back into Carlos's space. He's speeding through a hundred thousand words a minute, only understandable in snips of glowing adjectives and embarrassingly endearing exclamations that Carlos knows in cadence more than definition.

Cecil runs out of breath quickly and just shakes his beaming head at Carlos in disbelief. "I love you too," he says, and the exclamation points are there in intent if not in inflection. "Of course I do, Carlos, I've been waiting so long to tell you."

"You have been?" Carlos asks teasingly. "Mister 'I fell in love instantly'?"

Behind Cecil's shoulder, Carlos can see the cubes beginning to sift into the ground. Their base edges are grainy and phasing down into the concrete beneath them, but it doesn't matter. As terrible a survival skill it is, there is nothing on any earth that could make Carlos look away as Cecil blushes and smacks Carlos's shoulder.

"I was exaggerating," Cecil says. "You have to play things up sometimes, you know, for the radio."

"Mmm, I don't know," Carlos drawls. "You sounded pretty serious to me."

Cecil rolls his eyes, but the only word to describe the way he runs a careful hand through Carlos's hair is 'tender' still. "It was a different kind of love," he says. "Too perfect, just for lack of knowing. Not really love at all." He smiles. "Not like this."

He doesn't say anything more, but Carlos understands. He leans in for a gentle kiss, time slowing for them for this moment. There are things waiting for them—science to discover, radio to report, lives to live as best they can. He really _does_ want to understand, know, feel, whatever is the right verb, what exactly the condos were, and the goo-speckled tape recorder whirring spittingly next to them has not gone unnoticed. There are always things to do, to run away from or towards.

But here, on the cracked pavement outside of what used to be a dollar store and is now some otherworldly glass-case of humanity, _here_ , they sit. Fingers are intertwined, smiles read by touch, words whispered for two ears alone, and the sun slows in its setting as the smallest gift.

An echo reaches out, but they are untouchable. They are whole.

**Author's Note:**

> hey did you know i've been meaning to write this fic for like four fucking years, yeah, anyway, this is exactly 100% what happened and you can pry it from my cold dead hands
> 
> this was a bad example for this bc it had in-story verbatim dialogue but as a general rule i think quotes from carlos are cleaned up by cecil and paint him in a more... socially competent light than is wholly true. and also all that stuff about scientists do this, scientists do that, the arcane codes and symbols, that's all cecil making assumptions based on night vale science and carlos being like YUP SURE SOUNDS RIGHT DEFINITELY also i love him just some fun facts for you guys
> 
> (bonus fun fact also, the line about goo was originally just a placeholder cuz i'm bad at synonyms sometimes, but then i realized it was perfectly in character so i kept it lol)
> 
> title from "[all delighted people](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NW02HUysX3w)" by sufjan stevens, one of my all time favorite songs. i think technically it's supposed to be a subversion of the idiom "from the bottom of my heart" to indicate how shallow it is, but i like the idea of it meaning a heart so full and overflowing. you know, an outsized love, that seeps and pools. episode transcript from memory and then double-checked for grammar and punctuation with the book lol
> 
> ahhh anyway sorry abt the long a/n but i love night vale a lot and love writing it and this is my favorite episode and has beeeeeen since it came out. also i hope this doesn't come off as trying too hard to emulate the tone of the show!! that's literally just how i write (which, i guess, is bc i love it so much), but i hope y'all like it this is important to me lmao
> 
> tumblr @[moonfullofstars](http://moonfullofstars.tumblr.com)
> 
> (coda:  
> "Can I tell you a secret?"  
> Cecil turns over. The bedroom (not theirs, not yet, but close) is a thin burgundy, just enough light to see by. He nods.  
> "Me too, I—" Carlos blushes, barely perceptible in the lowlight. "I fell in love instantly too," he whispers, not because it is embarrassing but because it is something so consequentially small for only the two of them. "I mean, love as we know it is a series of decisions made day by day, but still. Me too."  
> Cecil smiles and tucks his head under Carlos's. "I'm glad you made those decisions."  
> "I'm glad I fell.")


End file.
